Careers Expo - Art Gallery

 We had our annual careers expo this week, and we decided that the Visual Art and DVC department would put on an art gallery style exhibition of student work as a practice run for our big art exhibition next term.

We had been thinking about how to display the sculpture work for a while. This is the first time Tamaki College has done sculpture at NCEA so we had no prior way of displaying it and we really wanted each piece of student work to have its own plinth. We then had the idea of using concrete building blocks to build our own plinths that can be assembled and disassembled as we need them. Also, they can be built to the height we need.

So we found an Auckland company that could supply and deliver a pallet load of the blocks we needed and my senior class then got the job of moving them off the pallet into the back of the garage. With a piece of plywood as the top, the practice plinth came out looking just how we wanted it.

Our head of careers who was organising the whole event got hold of a load of old political campaign board. These are really big and plain white on the back. She told us to come and take what we wanted. As we wanted to display a lot of the students drawings and artwork, just relying on the wall behind where we were going to be in the sports hall was not going to be enough. We had the idea of taping up three of the boards to make a large free standing triangular structure. This could then be stood anywhere and have loads of space for 2D artwork. White gaffer tape which did the job on the corners really well and they stood up securely.

It was a big job in the days running up to the day, as we had a lot of photographing of student work to do and we then printed it out A3 sized. We used the same burgundy border around everything to link it all together. We made a shared Google presentation to do this and made the page size A3 so there would be no pixelating.

Link to presentation

We printed a couple of posters and one of the Year 12 students sculpture photographs onto A1 so they made an impact on the boards.

It was my lovely senior class on the day of the expo who got the job of moving all the blocks and boards.

We then set everything up. We had been given the area in front of the doors so the gallery was the first thing people saw as they were entering the expo. We took advantage of this and went either side of the door so people had to actually walk through the gallery to enter.

We got lots of good feedback on the night, gave out lots of flyers and hopefully inspired some students to choose Visual Art or DVC next year.